With the worldwide acceptance of wireless telecommunications devices, parties often carry more than one device. They might have one device for work affairs and another device for personal affairs. One way to reduce the number of devices one carries is to provision one or more numbers, for example, one or more calling or called party numbers, for a single device, for example, one number for work affairs, and one number for personal affairs. The one or more numbers comprise one or more E.164 numbers (e.g. phone number 1-888-555-1000) or one or more Session Initiation Protocol (“SIP”) Universal Resource Identifiers (“URIs”) (e.g. a web address www.yoursite.com). To provide billing for the one or more numbers for calls used for initiation the call or terminating the call, the call must contain information regarding the party of the initiation device and the party of the termination device.
One piece of information required for accurate billing is the called party number. The called party number comprises the number of a device to which a call is directed. The technology of the device currently supports the called party number field when initiating or terminating the call. The network employs the called party number to route the call to the termination device. The called party number serves as the billing number of the termination device. Another piece of information required for accurate billing is the calling party number. The calling party number comprises the number of a device which initiated a call.
One way to indicate the calling party number of the initiation device is for the technology of the device to support the P-Asserted-Identity header. The P-Asserted-Identity header is one of the Third Generation Partnership Project (“3GPP”) defined headers used to convey the calling party number of the initiation device to the termination device. The calling party number serves as the billing number of the initiation device.
Without a standard signaling protocol established between the network and the devices, the network provider is forced to either support both signaling protocols at great cost, or support one signaling protocol at risk of customer resentment.
Thus there is a need to support multiple line billing in the Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (“UMTS”) or Global System for Mobile communication (“GSM”) systems where one or more signaling protocols are available for the devices requiring minimal impact to the network.